I have a monitoring device in my home and want to periodically upload information. The basic choices would seem to be either pushing from it to my eskimo account, or periodically pulling from it. What can I do from a standard shell account?

I am a bit vague on how hitting my public web site (eskimo.com/~user) gets routed to my public_html directory. Can I put up something that responds on another port and push to it if I want to run something like xmlrpc over http? Or just create a subdirectory and specify it in the URL? Scp or ftp could be alternatives.

If I want to write something that pulls from my device, can I simply create a crontab entry for myself? In that case my device has a simple web server that a wget command could hit, say. Or, again, some sort of custom http/xmlrpc protocol.

I'll be honest, I don't understand enough about how xmprpc works to answer your question directly, hopefully someone else can. I do know that hackers widely attempt to abuse it in WordPress and for that reason I disable it on my WordPress installations.

Most of the weatherstations that are here use ftp to update their websites.

For what it's worth yes, now I know you can do that (as long as you haven't explicitly disabled it in your installation as I have), and you can also use ftp or scp, or sshfs for that matter. And with regards to running multiple Wordpress installation (as we do on our site), you don't need a separate database, just specify a different table prefix for each installation.